On Q Professional Investigations

City-wide surveillance networks and systems are a hot topic in law enforcement. But how do you know where to begin when there’s enough new stuff out there to make your head spin? Like most things in law enforcement, it takes organization and communication to get first-rate surveillance programs off the ground.

When we talk about leveraging large-scale video surveillance systems today, questions abound: what to use, how to integrate systems, how to store data and who will review. Perhaps the biggest question of all is, “Is it a viable purchase for my jurisdiction?”

In 2011 the Department of Justice released the report “Study: Evaluating the Use of Public Surveillance Cameras for Crime Control and Prevention” where it looked at the impact of public surveillance cameras used for crime control purposes in D.C., Chicago and Baltimore; the goal was to illustrate the many ways in which cameras can be implemented and used by jurisdictions, and suggested that these differences affect the degree to which cameras reduce crime.

According to the study, public surveillance tech can indeed be useful for preventing crimes, aiding in arrests and supporting investigations and prosecutions. It reads, too, that “cameras, when actively monitored, have a cost-beneficial impact on crime with no statistically significant evidence of displacement to neighboring areas. However, in some contexts and locations these crime reduction benefits are not realized.”

Of course, cameras alone can never be a silver bullet, and various regions of the country utilize them with mixed results. As this study notes, “public surveillance technology is only as good as the manner in which it is employed.” It’s no big secret cameras need to be used alongside community-oriented problem-solving strategies and intelligence-led policing. Therefore best practices in use, integration and management are a big part of it.

In this issue, you can read about police departments in Elgin, Ill.; Philadelphia and others who instituted formal programs to register and share footage with surveillance cameras with businesses and entire cities. In some places, video from school cameras feeds into a police station’s transportation center where it can be monitored at all times.

You can also get tips on storing video footage in Ray Heineman’s article “You can afford to store your surveillance data”. Yes, cloud-based services are holding their own in terms of security and data integrity, but don’t throw away your tape just yet. It turns out tape saves power and cooling costs over disk systems, and boasts a 30-year shelf life.

Another place to find information on city-wide surveillance systems is at the Secured Cities conference in Baltimore coming up this November. The meeting grounds for security technology providers, municipal government and emergency responders was designed to help these practitioners better navigate the changing landscape of surveillance tech. Its conferences and exhibits focus on staffing, best practices and lessons learned by those in the trenches.

In this field, too, it is evident that technology is always in flux, but learning is forever.

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If the stakes involved hadn’t been so tragic, the media coverage of the shooting at the Washington Navy Yard might have been amusing. It certainly provided a sense of déjà vu, in more ways than one. Once again, we had the specter of a mass murder unfolding in real time on our television screens. Once again, we had the media report “facts” that turned out to be false. And once again, the usual suspects climbed onto the usual hobby horses, only to have them collapse underneath them as the real facts emerged.

Now, some confusion during Monday’s events is understandable. The police don’t tend to offer a lot of information about a live shooting scene while they are busy attempting to stop the shooter, so the media turns to secondary sources. Witnesses don’t see the whole picture, and often offer contradictory information that later gets corrected or withdrawn. At different points in the crisis, the media reported that there were one, two, and three shooters involved — and even a second location, with reports of shots fired at an Air Force base that turned out to be false. The police took hours in tracking down the other supposed shooters to discover that they had no connection to the crime.

Other confused reports are less explicable. After the police had secured the crime scene, both CBS and NBC identified the shooter as Rollie Chance, which immediately flashed out to viewers and readers across all platforms. Unfortunately for CBS, NBC, and Rollie Chance, the report turned out to be wrong. Chance dropped his identification in the panic to seek safety in the building. Someone just assumed that the ID belonged to the now-dead perpetrator and passed that information to the media, who picked it up and ran with it, only to shame-facedly retract the report later.

Veteran media watchers know better than to rely on these early reports from crisis situations. The media has its limits, and mistakes will be made, for which some tolerance must be extended as the cost of getting the kind of moment-by-moment reporting — although identifying a suspect by name and getting it wrong goes beyond the tolerance point, especially for the wronged person’s family and friends. Discretion, in all senses of the word, demands that analysts wait for facts to be clearly established before drawing conclusions about such events. That includes the NRA, which took some criticism for not responding immediately to an event that had yet to be clarified.

If only everyone exercised that kind of discretion. Unfortunately, demagogues and activists rarely apply discretion or even common sense when these opportunities present themselves. Sloppy reporting helped fuel two embarrassing leaps to conclusions at major media outlets, while the correction to the previously reported false claim initially got buried.

During the crisis, the media began reporting that the shooter, who ended up murdering 12 people in the Washington Navy Yard, was using an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. The AR-15 had been used in other mass shootings, which may be why some start off assuming that any mass shooting involves a semi-automatic rifle in general, and the AR-15 specifically. (The AR-15 and its knockoffs are among the most popular firearms in its class, with as many as 3.7 million privately owned in the U.S.)

However, in this case the assumption proved incorrect. On Tuesday morning, the FBI confirmed that the shooter used three weapons, none of which were an AR-15 or even a semi-automatic rifle. Instead, law enforcement found two pistols, apparently taken from victims of the massacre, and a shotgun that the assailant brought with him to start the shooting spree. CNN, however, initially chose to note that fact within a profile of how the AR-15 has been used in other mass shootings, oddly burying the lead.

Too bad that some people, including hosts on CNN itself, didn’t bother to wait for that information before using the poor reporting to reinforce their own agendas. Mike Lupica at the New York Daily News wrote an entire column about the evil AR-15 to argue for an assault-weapons ban that wouldn’t have stopped this massacre. He called the weapon the rifle “for the sport of killing humans,” which is utterly mystifying considering the vast number of AR-15s in private hands and the rarity of this “sport.” The Daily News ran a huge front-page headline that claimed “SAME GUN — DIFFERENT SLAY,” which as Politico’s Dylan Byers noted after the FBI’s statement, “sort of complicates things … for the New York Daily News.” Well, only if it takes its credibility seriously.

CNN’s Monday night lineup offered a couple of more pratfalls on journalistic credibility. Anderson Cooper’s screen-graphics crew repeatedly asserted that the shooter had “legally purchased an AR-15 shotgun” while Cooper and his guests discussed the shooting. That reporting was based on nothing at all; it later was established that the shooter had once rented an AR-15, but was not in possession of it at the time of the shooting. That pales in comparison to that evening’s show with Piers Morgan, who repeatedly insisted that the AR-15 had been used in the crime, arguing for a new assault-weapons ban because of it, and shouting down his guests when they attempted to disagree.

The next day, Morgan shifted his argument to this: “Lots of confusion over exactly what guns Wash Navy Yard shooter used. But do you think it matters to the victims?” It mattered to Morgan the night before, and it matters to those pushing an assault-weapons ban, some of whom — Vice President Joe Biden among them — argue that people should buy shotguns instead of AR-15s for home protection. Had Morgan waited to launch his latest jeremiad for gun control, perhaps he could have crafted an argument that actually fit the facts.

The NRA wisely stuck to its policy of waiting at least 24 hours before commenting on a shooting. Perhaps the rest of the media might consider adopting the same policy.

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A Russian-speaking man casually shows on camera how he can download a punter’s bank-card details and PIN from a hacked card reader.

In a video demonstrating a tampered sales terminal, a card is swiped through the handheld device and a PIN entered – just as any customer would in a restaurant or shop. Later, after a series of key-presses, the data is transferred to a laptop via a serial cable.

Account numbers and other sensitive information appear on the computer screen, ready to be exploited. And the data can be texted to a phone, if a SIM card is fitted to the handheld.

We’re told the footage, apparently shown on an underworld bazaar, is used to flog the compromised but otherwise working kit for $3,000 apiece – or a mere $2,000 if you’re willing to share 20 per cent of the ill-gotten gains with the sellers under a form of hired-purchase agreement.

Crucially, the gang selling this device offers a money-laundering service to drain victims’ bank accounts for newbie fraudsters: a network of corrupt merchants are given the harvested card data and extract the money typically by buying fake goods and then cashing out refunds. The loot eventually works its way back to the owner of the hacked card reader.

A copy of the web video was passed to The Reg, and is embedded below. We have rotated part of the footage so it’s easier to read the on-screen text.

Electronic security consultancy Group-IB said the modified Verifone VX670 point-of-sale terminal, shown above, retains in memory data hoovered from tracks 1 and 2 of the magnetic stripe on the back of swiped bank cards, as well as the PIN entered on the keypad – enough information for fraudsters to exploit.

The setup suggests the sellers are based in Russia. In the video, a credit card from Sberbank, the country’s largest bank and the third largest in Europe, is used to demonstrate the hacked terminal’s capabilities.

If a SIM card for a GSM mobile phone network is fitted to the doctored device, the information can be sent by SMS rather than transferred over a serial cable, explained Andrey Komarov, head of international projects at Group-IB.

He told us crooks tampering with point-of-sale (POS) terminals and selling them isn’t new – but the bundling of money-stealing support services, allowing fraud to be carried out more easily, is a new development in the digital underground.

“We have detected a new group that sells this modified model of POS terminals and provides services for illegal cash-outs of dumped PINs through their own ‘grey’ merchants: it seems they buy fake stuff, and then cash-out money,” Komarov said.

“It takes less than three hours. According to our information, this kind of service is really new, and it is also being used by different cyber-criminals against the Russian bank Sberbank.”

Komarov told El Reg that the emergence of hacked card readers is due to banks improving their security against criminals’ card-skimming hardware hidden in cash machines and similar scams. Planting data-swiping malware in POS handhelds out in the field is possible, but it is fairly tricky to find vulnerable terminals and infiltrate them reliably without being caught.

It’s a touch easier to buy a tampered device and get it installed in a shop or restaurant with the help of staff or bosses on the take. This creates a huge potential market for fraudsters, according to Komarov.

Scam warnings

Banking giant Visa has issued several alerts about this kind of fraud along with occasional warnings about device vulnerabilities – such as this warning from 2009 [PDF]. And social-engineering tricks [PDF] in which fraudsters pose as Visa employees carrying out adjustments to terminals – while actually compromising them – has been going on for years.

One alert [PDF] from Visa, dating from 2010, explains how thieves worked in the past and the steps merchants can take to defend against the fraud: anti-tampering advice from this year can be found here [PDF], an extract of which is below:

Criminal gangs worldwide are illegally accessing active POS terminals and modifying them by inserting an undetectable electronic “bug” that captures cardholder data and PINs during normal transaction processing.
The impact of this type of crime can be significant to all key parties involved in card acceptance. An attack can not only undermine the integrity of the payment system, but diminish consumer trust in a merchant’s business. In response to this emerging threat, acquirers, merchants and their processors need to proactively secure their POS terminals and make them less vulnerable to tampering.

A more recent advisory on combating this type of fraud, issued earlier this year by Visa, can be found here [PDF].

Avivah Litan, a Gartner Research vice-president and an expert in banking security and related topics, said that tampering with card readers has been going on for years. She agreed with Group-IB’s observation that since banks are investing more in securing cashpoints, penetrating point-of-sale terminals can be an easier way to make money for criminals.

“The bad guys will go after anything they can, but it can be easier to find dishonest merchants to cooperate in running tampered terminals [to harvest bank details] than going after ATMs,” Litan told El Reg, adding that this kind of fraud was rife in South America, particularly in countries such as Brazil.

But Group-IB’s Komarov believes the Russian-speaking fraudsters behind the black-market sale of hacked sales terminals are targeting the international market as well as crims in the motherland. “The example they showed for Sberbank was just because they also use it against Russian-speaking countries, as they have Russian-speaking roots,” he explained.

We passed on Group-IB’s research to Verifone at the start of this month, along with a request for comment on what could be done to frustrate the trade of tampered card readers through underground markets and similar scams. We have yet to hear back from the device manufacturer. We’ll update this story if we hear more. ®

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard the National Security Agency vehemently denying that its spy program is trampling on the constitutional rights of citizens, while privacy advocates bellow about the rise of Orwellian dictatorships. They do love trotting out the 1984 metaphors.

Frankly, there are hypocrisies on both sides. But retailers using data mining and loyalty programs, could get caught in the wringer if they don’t police themselves and those that gather the data. More disturbing is what I’ve heard in retail circles recently about reining in customer analytics for fear of incurring the wrath of privacy activists.

I sincerely hope that government surveillance is more concerned with terrorist plots than people’s personal proclivities. But surveillance isn’t new. It just went electronic with George Orwell’s vision of an authoritarian utopia and the Internet has simply made it easier.

The fact is that someone, somewhere keeps tabs on you from the time you’re born to when you open your first checking account, use your first credit card, switch on your first computer, or make your first cellphone call.

Contrary to popular opinion, the Constitution doesn’t guarantee the right to privacy, although the Supreme Court said it’s implied in several Amendments. This was brought to an illogical and frankly, dumb, conclusion in 2011 by the California Supreme Court in the case of Pineda v. Williams-Sonoma where the plaintiff alleged that the store lied about needing her zip code to complete a credit card transaction. She said it was used it to track down her home address for marketing purposes and that her information was being sold.

The takeaway is that where there’s a will, there’s a lawyer and a court that will consider the legal ramifications of a tempest in a teapot.

Where does that leave retailers? Customer surveillance, or customer analytics to use a gentler term, has become a rallying cry throughout the industry and one of the most valuable tools in the retail arsenal.

But the furor over the NSA’s actions, will likely unleash a spate of data privacy bills in Congress this year. The latest is the “Apps Act,” which requires consumers to sign off on privacy policies before using them. This moves the industry closer to European privacy laws, with very strict rules about what companies can and can’t do. At the very least, it’s another barrier between customers and the checkout. And, as we have seen, people will simply abandon their carts if the process becomes too cumbersome or inquisitive.

Congress simply isn’t capable of coming to grips with complex privacy issues. As I said, the industry is more than capable of policing itself and making the best use of the data for itself and its customers. But in the immortal words of comic book icon Stan Lee: “With great power comes great responsibility”.

Never take consumers for granted and don’t keep secrets. Tell them how the information helps create a better, more rewarding shopping experience. Assure them that the data is safe and not for sale to outsiders. Make sure all IT security systems are up-to-date—even surpassing industry norms—and initiate oversight of your own IT departments. Most important, don’t abandon data gathering for fear of backlash—real or imagined.

Collecting and analyzing shopper data is not an option. It is a business imperative for improving operations, sales and profits and anticipating customer demand. The competition for reliable information is intense, but cheaper to obtain from reliable outsiders then ever. Why not use it to its fullest?

Sometimes having a Big Brother watching is not such a bad thing.

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Oakland CA Sept 16 2013 The black squad car sits silent, its mere presence intended to be enough to scare off anyone mulling a run up Sequoyah Road to loot a house or bust a car window.

Although it looks the part, the Ford Crown Victoria isn’t actually a police car, and the man behind the wheel is no cop. He’s one of dozens of private security officers hired by residents across Oakland to supplement – if not replace – a depleted, overwhelmed police force.

As burglaries, home invasions, carjackings and assaults creep into Oakland neighborhoods less accustomed to crime, residents have built fences, armed alarms and installed security cameras.

And now, in greater numbers, they’re hiring private security patrols.

“One night I was at home and the alarm came on and the dogs started barking like mad, and I called the police and I stayed on the phone with the operator – and it took them 20 minutes to come,” said Mary Graham, a retired Oakland high school teacher who lives in Sequoyah Hills, a secluded, woodsy neighborhood near the Oakland Zoo.

The racket of the alarm and dogs apparently discouraged the break-in, but Graham was shaken. “So I figured we better get (private security). They have this type of security in buildings. I don’t see why we shouldn’t have it in our neighborhood.”

Now, Graham and 45 of her neighbors each spend $20 a month to have private security officers patrol the streets of Sequoyah Hills.

Elizabeth Caprini, general manager of the security company patrolling the neighborhood, VMA Security Group, estimates that her company will be guarding 500 homes across Oakland by November.

“Homes are getting broken into, drug dealing and prostitution are taking place,” Caprini said. “All that people want is to be able to use our services to be their eyes and ears for them.”

Crime in the city has soared in recent years. Robberies are up 54 percent from 2011, according to police records, while burglaries have risen nearly 40 percent. Auto thefts have increased by 33 percent.

A group of residents on three blocks of the Oakmore neighborhood – just a block away from Mayor Jean Quan’s home – were the first to hire private security last year after a burglar tried to enter a home occupied by two children.

Their idea caught on.

Nate Cook, owner of the firm Intervention Group Security, said his officers now patrol 300 homes. That number will rise to 500 in October when the company starts patrolling the Parkridge neighborhood near Skyline High School.

In the last two years, Cook said, patrolling Oakland neighborhoods has become a larger part of his business. No other cities have entire neighborhoods that have hired his company, he said.

“I’m talking to people all the time (in Oakland) to see what we can do,” he said. “They call me all the time.”

The service isn’t limited to the affluent hills neighborhoods.

In middle-class Maxwell Park, just northwest of Mills College, 180 residents have banded together to hire a security guard to patrol their neighborhood for four hours a day, five days a week. He started Wednesday.

“It costs each of us about 50 cents a day,” said Jose Durado, chairman of the neighborhood council. “As we get 45 new households to join, we get an additional hour of security.”

The guard’s patrol car, Durado said, will be marked “Maxwell Park Security.”

“We’re hoping that we can act as an example,” Durado said. “We expect that there will be other neighborhoods around us that will say, ‘How did you guys do that?’ ”

The security companies are quick to say they aren’t replacement cops – they’re mostly there to scare thugs out of the neighborhood or to report suspicious activity.

But if pressed, Cook said, his officers – some of whom are armed – wouldn’t hesitate to detain someone until police arrived. As private guards, they can’t do more than make a citizen’s arrest – something Cook said his officers have not yet done.

“Sometimes OPD is able to do something,” Cook said. “Sometimes it is the luck of the draw.”

Oakland police appreciate the help, said Officer Johnna Watson, a police spokeswoman.

“We are all striving for the same goal, and that is reducing crime,” she said. “The security companies are an extra set of eyes that allow the community to be empowered.”

Putting more police on the streets is the city’s top priority, said Sean Maher, a spokesman for Quan. There are now 615 officers patrolling the city of roughly 400,000 people – down from a peak of 830 officers in January 2009, according to police records.

“When communities get organized and rally around a cause like public safety, it is incredibly effective,” Maher said. “It is unfortunate that people feel forced to do this. We want a fully staffed Police Department.”

Chuck Wexler, head of the Police Executive Research Forum, a police think tank in Washington, D.C., said private security patrols are “a sign of the times.”

“Cities are cash-strapped, and they are finding it difficult to keep up with the costs of a municipal police force,” Wexler said. “And if you want more police, you really have to ask yourself this question: What are cities prepared to do?”

Still, Wexler said, private security companies are no substitute for a competent police force.

“When you are talking about municipal police, you are talking about public officials and holding them to a high standard,” he said. “If private security is involved, they should be held to an equally high standard.

“When there is an emergency kind of situation, there is nothing better than a good police officer, and there is nothing worse than a bad police officer,” Wexler said. “The same is true for private security.”

In Crown Ridge, a collection of homes near Merritt College with sweeping views of the Bay Area, 150 members of the neighborhood association started paying for private patrols in May.

Since then, there’s been hardly a whiff of crime, said Nancy Safford, a member of the association’s public safety committee.

“Both in terms of amounts and seriousness, (burglaries and break-ins) were escalating,” Safford said. “What we were observing was at least two to five cars a day drive through the neighborhood that we were fairly confident weren’t visiting the neighborhood, but were casing the neighborhood – and that has completely stopped.”

Safford, a retired mortgage banking executive, said the patrols have contributed to “a rebirth of our neighborhood.”

Crime “put fear in us,” she said. Now, she said, “families are out, kids are out, people are walking their dogs. We have a better sense of community and a feeling of peace, or calm, and security.”

One city councilwoman said all residents are entitled to such peace of mind, but that they shouldn’t have to hire security guards to achieve it.

“Oaklanders deserve more safety, and to the extent that citizens can generate it for themselves and their neighborhood, I applaud that effort,” said Councilwoman Libby Schaaf. “But it does not excuse the city for failing to provide the most basic element of government. It is not a substitute.”

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TBI spokeswoman Kristin Helm says the agency’s violent-crime response team was called to the scene on Renegade Mountain near Crossville on Thursday morning.

She said the car was found near an abandoned guard shack at a resort community about 50 miles west of Knoxville.

The Renegade Mountain Resort was built in 1969 as part of a gated community, and at one time had a lounge, restaurant, lodge and ski slope. The lodge burned down in 2000.

Homeowners association President John Moore said the resort’s owners got rid of the controlled access in 2010. He said a resident found the bodies on the way to work Thursday morning after seeing a parked car and going to investigate.

Moore said the community is on 3,000 acres on the top of a mountain. The area is wooded and isolated, with 141 houses and only 43 full-time residents.

“There are 10 miles of road on 3,000 acres,” he said. “It’s easy to get lost or be invisible once you get past the gate.”

He said the car with the bodies was about 100 feet off the main road going up the mountain.

Moore moved to Renegade Mountain in 2006 and calls it “the best place in the world.”

However, he said, residents are fighting the owners of the community over how they have managed it. The residents sued in 2011, and one of their concerns is lack of security.

Since the owners got rid of the controlled access, Moore said, “there’ve been some break-ins, some sight-seers, some drug dealers and some parkers.”

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Biometric identifiers, in one form or another, have been a part of the security industry for some time. While most biometric access control solutions use a fingerprint or an iris scan to identify an individual, Toronto-based Bionym is taking a unique approach to the market with a newly launched solution called the Nymi. Unlike other biometric devices that make the user submit to a physical read of their finger or eye, the Nymi is a wearable authentication device that uses a person’s heartbeat to verify their identity.

According to Karl Martin, co-founder and CEO of Bionym, the idea of using someone’s heartbeat as a way to uniquely identify them goes back nearly 40 years. Over the past 10 years, however, he said that research groups around the world have been working to develop automated robot systems that could use electrocardiograms (ECGs) as a biometric. Researchers at the University of Toronto, including Bionym co-founder and CTO Foteini Agrafioti, recently made a breakthrough by finding an automated way of extracting features that relate to the shape of a heart wave that are unique to each person, explained Martin.

“It was a very robust method that could work in the real world. A lot of the other research in the area, they used methods that involved finding very specific points on the wave and looking at relative measures between those points. It’s very unreliable,” said Martin “The method at the University of Toronto looked at the overall shape and was not as sensitive to things like noise, which you see in real life. By looking at the overall shape and unique algorithms to extract those features, it was found that you could have a relatively reliable way to recognize people using a real world ECG signal.”

Martin, who along with Agrafioti worked on biometric, security and cryptography technologies as doctoral students at the University of Toronto, said they founded Bionym as a way to commercialize their work.

“We decided there was an opportunity to make a more complete solution with our technology,” he said. “We looked at what was happening with wearable technology and we realized that’s what we had with biometric recognition using the heart. It married very well with wearable technology and we could essentially create this new kind of product that was an authenticator that you wear rather than something embedded in a mobile phone, tablet or computer.”

Although other promising biometric technologies and companies have made a splash in the security industry only to flame out a short time later, Martin believes that the approach his company is taking sets it apart from others.

“We’re really driven by our vision, which is to enable a really seamless user experience in a way that is still very secure. So many of the security products and the biometric technologies out there – it’s almost kind of like a solution looking for a problem,” said Martin. “Somebody comes up with a new method and says, ‘oh, we can use it like this,’ but the question is what really new are you enabling? In many cases, you’re talking about access control – whether it’s physical or logical access control. Fingerprint is still sort of the most common because it’s robust, people know it, they understand it, but the other technologies haven’t really brought anything new to the table. What we’re doing with this technology and bringing something new to the table is it’s not so much in the core technology itself using the ECG, it’s the marriage of that technology in a wearable form factor.”

Because the Nymi is wearable, Martin said that identity can be communicated wirelessly in a simpler, more convenient way than what’s previously been available.

“The person only has to do something when they put the device on, so they put it on, they become authenticated and then they can essentially forget about it,” he added. “We’ve had a somewhat consumer focus because we are very focused on a convenient user experience, but we found that we actually were able to achieve almost that Holy Grail, which is convenience plus security.”

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Toronto police are trying to identify a man accused of hitting a cellphone store employee and stealing electronics and cash during a violent robbery earlier this year.

Police said the armed hold-up occurred at The Mobile Store on St. Clair Avenue West, near Runnymede Road, on May 28 at 11:45 a.m.

The suspect posed as a customer and asked questions about cases displayed behind the counter, and then pulled out a stun gun and used it to strike the employee, police said Wednesday.

After hitting the victim, the suspect fled with a bag filled with gadgets and a large sum of money.

Police said the man is white, in his late 20s, five-foot-seven and 240 to 250 pounds with facial hair.

He was wearing black sunglasses, blue jeans, a blue coat and a grey hoodie. He was driving a black BMW 128.

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Just two weeks ago, a gunman entered a school in Georgia with an AK-47 and began shooting. An Australian baseball player was senselessly murdered in Oklahoma City. Elementary schools in Colorado hold drills where five-year-old kids hunker down behind tables while an “active shooter” knocks at the door. Just this week, Colorado voters ejected in recall elections two state senators who had sponsored new gun control laws in the wake of the Aurora cinema mass shooting. And the grim parade of gun violence in our cities marches on.

This madness must end – and it will when Congress stops ignoring the will of the American people and makes our nation and the entire world safer by passing common-sense and constitutional gun safety measures. The vast majority of Americans, including gun owners, agree on what needs to be done to cure our gun violence epidemic, which will not only save lives, but spare America from embarrassment in the world.

Australia’s former deputy prime minister, Tim Fischer, said last Friday:

They cannot expect not to have any criticism of it worldwide … I am angry because it is corrupting the world, this gun culture of the United States.

Indeed,the US has six times the gun death rate of other first world countries. This is not the America our founding fathers envisioned.

At our nation’s birth on 4 July 1776, our founding fathers endowed Americans with “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. Those overarching rights are being eroded by the proliferation of gun violence.

Look no further than the elementary school down the road from me in Sandy Hook, and ask: is the desire to purchase any gun whatsoever without a background check more important than the life of a six-year-old child? Or 20 children and six teachers, for that matter? Is it more important than enacting a strong anti-trafficking law to shut down the “iron pipeline” into our cities? Does this desire justify trying to recall two state senators in Colorado who voted for background checks, high-capacity magazine limits, and restricting domestic violence offenders from purchasing guns? Most gun owners would say no. A loud minority says yes.

Let’s ignore this vocal fringe group, some of whom openly advocate treason (in violation of article 3 section 3 of the constitution). Instead, Americans must come together to call for Congress to put politics aside and pass common-sense measures that the majority of Americans, including gun owners, support.

First, the gun safety movement is not about “grabbing” guns. We appreciate traditional American gun culture grounded in hunting and shooting sports. We are not looking to take away any guns except the military-style weapons that were covered by Senator Dianne Feinstein’s assault weapons bill and high-capacity magazines.

These measures do not impact hunting and shooting sports. An AR-15 with a 30-round magazine is not necessary to kill a deer; it’s a military-style weapon meant to kill many people quickly. It has consistently been the weapon of choice for mass shootings. It does not belong on our streets, in our schools, or in our movie theaters.

We literally dodged a bullet a couple weeks ago at an elementary school in Georgia. Will we be so fortunate the next time a mentally disabled person shows up at a school? What if it were your kid’s school?

First, we need to ban military-style weapons and 30-round magazines, so that when the next unstable individual slips through the cracks in our healthcare system, their ability to access an assault weapon won’t be easier than buying a beer.

Second, the measures being sought in Congress do not include a national gun registry. This should allay the fears of gun owners. The recent set of bills, which a majority in the Senate supported, expressly outlawed a national registry. Besides, the NRA already maintains a national gun owner registry.

Third, gun reform advocates are not seeking to eliminate or revise the second amendment. Just as the right to free speech under the first amendment is not unlimited under the constitution, reasonable restrictions on gun ownership are also constitutional. You can neither falsely yell “fire” in a crowded theater, nor carry a bazooka into one.

The US supreme court has made clear that the right “secured by the second amendment is not unlimited”. The justices have determined that:

[T]he right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose … nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

The loud minority of gun rights proponents refuse to recognize these limitations on the second amendment. Ironically, in states like Missouri, they are also pushing “nullification” of the relatively weak federal gun control laws we do have – even though those efforts subvert the constitution itself.

Fourth, a federal anti-trafficking bill that includes real penalties for “straw buyers” is imperative, since firearms are being transported through many states. A strong bill will dry up the “iron pipeline”, the supply of cheap and plentiful firearms into our cities.

Finally, universal background checks would help reduce the risk of a firearm ending up in the hands of a criminal, a person affected by mental illness, or a terrorist. Currently, under federal law, a person on our terrorist watchlist can buy the Bushmaster AR-15 – the weapon used at both the Sandy Hook elementary school and at the Aurora movie theater – in a private transaction, without any questions being asked.

Moreover, many gun owners want to know that if they sell their firearm, the buyer is not on the terrorist watchlist or is not a felon. For these and other reasons, the majority of gun owners support the enactment of universal background checks. We should demand that our elected officials support universal background checks and refuse to tolerate the pro-gun lobby’s efforts to subvert those wishes because they want to sell more guns.

These are the common-sense measures being sought. They will save lives and help transform our nation into the one envisaged by its founders, of peace, hope and love.

Then, we could return our schools, neighborhoods and theaters to the safe havens of our childhoods. Since 14 December 2012, Americans have awoken to the gun violence epidemic, and are speaking out. New groups, such as the Newtown Action Alliance, Moms Demand, Team 26, Sandy Hook Promise, United Physicians of Newtown and others have united with older coalition members – from the country lanes of Newtown, to the college classrooms of Virginia Tech, and to the inner cities of Hartford, Newburgh, Baltimore and Chicago – to take back the US and to achieve greater gun safety.

This is the “Connecticut effect”. We are silent no more.

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National Security Agency personnel regularly searched call tracking data using thousands of numbers that had not been vetted in accordance with court-ordered procedures, according to previously secret legal filings and court opinions released by the Obama administration Tuesday.

The agency also falsely certified to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that analysts and technicians were complying with the court’s insistence that searches only be done with numbers that had a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” of terrorism, according to a senior intelligence official who briefed reporters prior to release of the documents .

The unauthorized searches went on for about three years until they were discovered in March 2009.

An internal inquiry into the misstatements also found that no one at the NSA understood how the entire call-tracking program worked. “There was nobody at NSA who really had a full idea of how the program was operating at the time,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed the program in June by leaking a top-secret FISA Court order authorizing it. The program — sometimes referred to as “business records FISA” or “Section 215” — collected information on the time, duration and numbers connected in virtually every call made to, from or within the United States. It did not authorize or involve listening to calls, which required a separate court order when involving people in the U.S. or U.S. residents overseas.

Despite the regular assurances offered to the court, NSA personnel were querying every day’s new batch of telephone company calling data using an “alert list” that at times included about 17,000 numbers, the documents show. Most of the numbers on that list — about 15,000 — had not been established to meet the “reasonable, articulable suspicion, officials said.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper emphasized Tuesday that the breach of procedure was discovered by the NSA on its own initiative and, once the violation was found, was promptly disclosed to the court and Congress.

“The compliance incidents discussed in these documents stemmed in large part from the complexity of the technology employed in connection with the bulk telephony metadata collection program, interaction of that technology with other NSA systems, and a lack of a shared understanding among various NSA components about how certain aspects of the complex architecture supporting the program functioned,” Clapper said in a statement. “These gaps in understanding led, in turn, to unintentional misrepresentations in the way the collection was described to the FISC.”

However, the new disclosures give weight to claims that the FISA Court was ill-suited to oversee the complex program. The information could fuel calls for more rigorous oversight of the program.

In an opinion made public in part last month, Judge John Bates discussed the “alert list” practice in vague terms and said it indicated that the court’s orders “had been ‘so frequently and systematically violated that it can be said that this critical element of the overall…regime has never functioned effectively.’”

The breach clearly angered the judges serving on the court.

“The court is exceptionally concerned about what appears to be a flagrant violation of its Order in this matter,” Judge Reggie Walton wrote in a January 2009 order demanding more information about the offending practice.

The officials who briefed reporters Tuesday did not make clear where the “alert list” came from or precisely how numbers got on it. They did indicate it originated outside the NSA.

The court filings suggest that the “alert list” was something the NSA used when targeting communications between parties outside the United States under the agencies’ traditional, “signals intelligence” capabilities.

The practice was reported to the court in January 2009 and halted on the court’s order in March of that year.

As a result of the breach of the court’s orders, the FISA Court essentially put the NSA on probation by requiring it to come to the court in advance for permission for each new number to be searched, officials said. That advance-approval process — which did allow for exceptions in emergencies — continued through September 2009, officials added.

The fact that a process requiring advance, “case by case” approval was in place for a time could also support arguments from civil liberties groups and other critics that the courts should be involved each time a number is added to the list of those to be searched.

Officials emphasized that the “alert list” queries were not like the regular queries of the call database. Those often pored through five years of data and looked for patterns in calls that could be removed by up to “three hops” from the original number searched. By contrast, the “alert list” searches were confined to the incoming day’s data and numbers in direct contact with those searched.

“This was a much narrower, sort of rolling-basis query just to try to identify numbers of interest, so it didn’t go out multiple hops,” the senior official said.

The approximately court documents released Tuesday, which officials said totaled about 1,800 pages including some duplicates, were disclosed in connection with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Obama administration long resisted calls to release the documents even in redacted form, saying they would be incoherent after sensitive information was deleted.

However, after Snowden’s leaks about the program, officials said they were reviewing the legal records again and would be able to make some disclosures. Officials said the document release Tuesday was being made at President Barack Obama’s instruction.

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